HIST 5520 History of Emotions

Emotions aren't timeless biological reactions but historically shaped experiences, and this graduate seminar treats them as a serious object of historical inquiry, something you can read out of archives, literature, and legal records the same way you'd read economic or political change. You'll work through the methodological debates (Rosenwein, Boddice, and the neuroscience-history interface), then apply those tools to Ottoman sources across the late medieval, early modern, and modern periods, building toward an original research paper. It sits alongside the department's social and cultural history offerings and is most useful if you're heading into Ottoman studies or any historiography where motive, affect, and meaning matter as much as event and structure.